Remember Last Night?

A wealthy group on Long Island wakes after a night of drinking to find one of them shot. None of them remembers the night. When the police arrive nobody can offer an alibi, because everyone passed out at some point. The suspects set about reconstructing the evening themselves. The film is not interested in the murder. It is interested in a class that has handed its memory to drink: these characters take the news of a death as a kind of joke, and the film mocks their indifference. Solving the crime stays in the background. The form mixes thirties studio comedy with crime: large houses, endless cocktails, fast dialogue and a hypnosis scene. James Whale directed. He had just finished Bride of Frankenstein and made this in an entirely different key, as black comedy; one of the films in which he stepped outside horror. Edward Arnold plays the detective, with Robert Young and Constance Cummings as the couple. Who it is for: viewers curious about fast studio comedy just after the pre-code years and the lesser-known Whale. Who it is not for: anyone wanting a coherent mystery. The solution is arbitrary, the characters are hard to tell apart, and the constant drunkenness becomes repetitive.